WHERE?
In your dormitory,
classroom or apartment,
at a friend's house,
at a park or other open area
the center of campus
downtown
in a restaurant or cafe
just about anywhere!

Strawberries in Michigan

Egg Sacs

February 2012

Lots of ideas for Menstrual Monday 2012 - now on video! Love the idea of "Occupy Your Period" stamped on a red mechanic's "rag," as well as menstrual red pine cones, pine cone seeds to plant, and blue W2 forms that burn in a special brazier (not brassiere, brazier). Occupy Your Period / Burn Your W2 - vacillation. Oscillation. Periodicity. It's all good.

Menstrual Monday Updates to follow (and video!)

__________________________

There's my favorite line in the movie "Jurassic Park," when Dr. Ian Malcolm, the character played by Jeff Goldblum, says:

"Boy, do I hate being right all the time!"

Although I might paraphrase that to, I hate coming back to the Broken Tampon Memorial Fountain all the time...the idea, the drawing, and yes, the
ambition to break ground, and build the thing...

One
of the odd features of menstrual research seems to be - it so rarely
connects up with anything else...as if the "taboo" surrounding
menstruation, among the general populace, is mirrored in the minds of
menstrual researchers...analysis and theorizing about menstruation
doesn't extend to, say, the Wall Street meltdown, or Gulf Oil spill,
well, because - menstruation is menstruation and Wall Street is Wall
Street...or: oil and menstrual cycles go together like, well, oil
and water...

...but I just wonder - if "quants" can "invade"
Wall Street (that is, people with PhDs in mathematics / statistics /
computer science), thereby transforming Wall Street...why can't
"mensts" (I can't really pronounce it either) launch a different kind
of invasion, and effect a different kind of transformation?

Photo
above: Univ of Michigan campus: A cenotaph, a memorial to those
whose remains lie elsewhere. Should we start creating
"envirotaphs," for creatures who die as a result of human-made
environmental disasters?

While designing the fountain (back in 2005), I
started to play around with four words:protection,
confidence, toxicity and shock. Two were good things and two were bad.
But it seemed like the switched-around formulation "toxic
protection leads to confidence shock" accurately described some of my own experiences, as
well as the history of Detroit.

Toxic Tampon Deja Vu – Part I

A few
years later I was overdrawn on my debit card – by 82 cents. The bank went
ahead and allowed a 2nd transaction to go through, so I ended up with $60 in
fees on 82 cents! When I called customer service to find out WHY the 2nd transaction
hadn't been "declined," I was told I had "overdraft
protection" on my account, as a "courtesy" from the bank!

I thought wow, I've been through
this before! Toxic protection:While
exposing you to great harm, they claim to be protecting you - creating super
profits for them and confidence shock (at the very least) for you!Happy ending:After I wrote a letter to the bank's president, the fees were
taken off. Now that's what I call protection!

Toxic
Tampon Deja Vu – Part II

2008
- and Wall Street crashes, due in large part to "exotic" financial
transactions, such as credit default swaps (derivatives):

"A credit default swap, in
its simplest form [...] is a bilateral contract between a protection
buyer and a protection seller."